hacks

I love my Soma Porteur Rack and I love how it helps me take weight off of my body and onto my bike. However, my small u-lock didn’t securely fit on the rack with a single bungee chord. So, I sewed these straps out of 1 1/2″ velcro. I’m interested in seeing if the velcro […]

I don’t particularly like coding in PHP, but I do think WordPress works well for building websites for small organizations in certain use cases. PHPs built-in webserver, which was added in recent versions of PHP helps make PHP web development feel closer to my flow using other languages and frameworks. In particular, it removes the […]

I’m not particularly averse to clutter, but getting met with a landslide of pot lids when I’m trying to make food quickly can be really frustrating. I’ve lived in a different house or apartment almost every year I’ve lived in Chicago, so the space often dictates where furniture goes and where items go on the […]

My weekend project was installing CyanogenMod 10.1 on an HTC One V phone that I got from my housemate. The phone is made for Virgin Mobile, which uses a CDMA network. The codename I’ve seen for the phone is primoc, though I don’t quite understand how the naming convention works. The process took me about […]

I’ve broken numerous pairs of sunglasses at the hinge where the temples connect to the rest of the frame. As frustrating as it was to just toss the otherwise useful glasses, it just seemed like too much hassle and expense to try to fix them. The surfaces seemed too rough and small to solder the […]

I was invited to run a station at a DiscoTech event sponsored by the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition (DDJC). DiscoTechs are community technology fairs, and are a really great model for sharing tech knowledge within and across communities. The DDJC has released a zine with stories and bootstrap practices so other groups can run their […]

I’m working on a virtualized environment to run scalable instances of the Public Mapping Project app. While the project offers an EC2 AMI, my boss wanted to run this on our own hardware, so we’re going to use VMware. To develop the instance images, I wanted to install VMware Server 2.0.2-203138 on my notebook which […]

I won a free O’Reilly ebook from a hackathon I participated in a while ago. I chose Visualizing Data and I’ve been working through the book. I always find that its more helpful to work on a project of my own that approximates the examples in a technical book instead of just reading or copying […]

As a Christmas gift for my father, I transferred a YouTube video of a public service announcement that he remembered fondly from his childhood to optical media so he could watch it on the television instead of on the computer. There were some unique sets of constraints that made this an interesting project. First, I […]